


Thunderhead

by carriecmoney



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Dust Bowl, Gen, Great Depression, Original Character Death(s), Storm God!Oikawa
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-02
Updated: 2016-01-02
Packaged: 2018-05-11 06:27:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,102
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5616877
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/carriecmoney/pseuds/carriecmoney
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p><em>“Stop being such a rainy day, Hajime,” it whines, “that’s my job.”</em><br/>“Oh?” Another sip of coffee. “Are you some kind of rain god, then?”<br/>It heaves a heavy sigh and lays back, feet coming up to prop on nothing. “God is such a heavy word.” It bounces a foot in the air. “I prefer deity.”<br/>Hajime snorts. “You’re a vain little shit.”</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thunderhead

**Author's Note:**

> {A/N: This idea has been sitting in my back pocket since the summer, and a few plane rides to and from New York City convinced me to wrap it up :) It's a little different than normal, so I hope y'all like it! [tumblr](http://carriecmoney.tumblr.com) [twitter](http://www.twitter.com/carriecmoney) [old art for this](http://carriecmoney.tumblr.com/post/124887935946)}

Hajime first sees death when he is six years and two months old. He and his sharecropping neighbor are playing in the fringes of their families’ Texarkansas cotton field, pulling up old burnt stubble for swords and weeds for ladies’ posies. Their families work, sharp sun a brand on their backs, but the youngest boys are not field-ready yet. Next harvest.

In the afternoon, a cool wind arrives from the north. Everyone turns dirty faces to it and the black wall of clouds it heralds. Hajime and his friend drop their hollow blades, homespun whapping against their necks, as they look up to the tumbling sky. Their families take their bags and run for the barn, a sister grabbing the two boys’ hands as she passes.

A rough root cellar is dug in the center of the barn and covered with an old door, but it’s a cramped fit for both families and their potatoes. They huddle around the opening, the little boys clutching skirts, all eyes wide at the cracks in the barn where leaves blow by, fat raindrops pinging on overhead tin.

The storm boils to a frenzy, barn doors clanging against their crossbar, sheet metal rattling. The families scream over it to _get down, get inside_ , but Hajime’s friend grabs his sleeve and slips them away, darting behind a haybale.

“I wanna watch,” he yells in Hajime’s ear, fingers of the storm stealing his words. Hajime frowns, trying to pull him back to the cellar, but his friend laughs and hauls him between an alfalfa tower and the barn wall, where a warp in the planks has cut out a sliver of the outside world, rain slicing through. They clutch each other’s clothes, grinning, the howl filling their skinny arms with invincibility. They can’t see the cotton bolls being sucked away in the fields.

The thunderstorm fights on, a battle between a sky god and their underground enemy. Lightning crackles down and explodes a mile away, but with no horizon disruptions it is at their fingertips, scorch marks on the ground. Hajime’s hair stands up, his armor falling away.

“Let’s go,” he shouts, pulling on his friend’s arm. He shakes Hajime off and presses his face to the crack, rainwater sluicing down like warpaint. Hajime tugs and tugs as the distant clouds dip to brush the horizon, a stringed connection that holds and twists. A tornado. The wind laughs as it spins, the vertical fishtail wrong, wrong, wrong. His friend laughs with it.

Hajime should have left him. He should have ran, crawled into the hole in the ground with his family and locked the door behind him. But this is his friend, his only friend; wooden swords and bugs in their sisters’ hair have bodylocked them together at the crossguard. He can’t leave him like this, even as the tornado whips closer, larger, faster, blacker. His friend still laughs, arm stretched through the gap in the wall, reaching for it.

“Look, it’s got my house!” Hajime presses back against the alfalfa hay, sharp dry sticks poking him everywhere, but he can still hear the crunch of dry wood anyway as the house is caught up and ripped apart. He clenches his eyes shut and turns his face into the bay, dual laughter burrowing in after him. “Yours is next, Iwa-chan!” Hajime buries deeper into the alfalfa, eyes leaking, running from the crazy storm and the crazy laughter. He digs with his hands, twigs poking holes in his skin, and climbs into the cavity, dried green shards falling around-

There’s a world-shattering _crunch_ outside of his hay haven. The laughter stops. He doesn’t go out to check.

When the storm has run by a lost time later, Hajime creeps out of the alfalfa, limbs trembling. The wind is still blowing, a brush of the belt instead of a whipping. The barn is barely standing, rotted wood gone, only the heavy iron-braced supports still intact. Their crack in the wall is a hole the size of the side, boards in chaos around them, a giants’ game of pickup sticks. Hajime rubs his shaking arms and looks around, wet face freezing. He sees a foot under a board.

He clambers over the teetering new hardwood, grubby hands out for balance, breath sucking. The wind plays with him, knocking him to his knees. He crawls to the poking foot, wincing as he lifts a piece of wood bigger than him.

His friend sprawls there, chest caved in, a slick trail of blood from his mouth stark against his white face, dirt-caked brown hair fluttering as the breeze filters through it. He doesn’t look asleep. He looks _dead_.

The wind steals his scream away, twisting off to join its distant source.

* * *

Hajime first believes in ghosts when he is six years and three months old. It’s not that he was an early skeptic before that; his head just wasn’t big enough to think about it. He’s barely been born - no time to be thinking about after death. As he stands in a field in a brother’s castoff best clothes, hands squeezed tight before him and his mother’s heat behind, he looks up from his friend’s little casket and sees him standing just beyond the graveyard fence. He stops breathing. His dead friend is staring right at him, wearing what he died in, blood gone but face still death-white. The wind whips his hair; he holds a finger to his lips, a sick grin splitting them, and turns away into a puff of smoke drifting off to join the gray clouds overhead.

That afternoon, another twister kills three more people in town.

* * *

Hajime first thinks he’s gone crazy when he is nine years and eight months old.

All of the Iwaizumis are a down-to-earth bunch, resilient, a necessity as one of the few Asian families settled in the American Midwest. His older siblings are hardworking and dependable, his parents terse and resolute. He’s the youngest of the brood, and most of the time, another page from the Iwaizumi guidebook, another leaf in the litter. Except. He’s haunted.

It takes a good year for him to connect his old friend’s appearance with an oncoming killer storm. He’s never close, always across the field or down the street, usually floating at a strange angle in the air; he still looks six, six and dead. He just grins at Hajime and vanishes, leaving dread twisting in his stomach. He’ll look around to see if anyone else sees him, look up at the mounting thunderheads. Grab the nearest family member’s hand and run.

His family just thinks he’s sensitive to storms after the incident. It’s truth, of course, but not the entirety of it. It’s the only weird thing about his life, though, so most of the time, he forgets it.

When he’s nine, almost ten, he can’t sleep, curled in the crook of a brother’s arm. The two youngest and the oldest share a bed, the three middle girls on the hay mattress across the room. Hajime gets along best with his oldest brother, two halves of the same head. He picks at his brother’s shirt until he moans, turning into him.

“Wha’sit, Haj?” he mumbles, rubbing his cheek on Hajime’s head. Hajime shrugs.

“Can’t sleep.” His brother hums, rubbing a hand down his back. “Do you believe in ghosts, Dai?” he whispers.

Dai grunts, sleep thick. “Anything’s possible if you go to sleep.” Hajime sighs and resigns himself to picking at the fraying seam of Dai’s shirt.

* * *

Hajime first unsettles his neighbors when he is ten years and seven months old. He’s at school, for once, hands fat and clumsy around the stylus he’s using to carve large letters into a clay tablet. The single schoolroom is buzzing around him, twenty children aged toddler to teenager clumped around their browning planners, their teacher flitting between groups in a race to stay afloat. Hajime is the only ten year old, long abandoned by his sharecropper friend. He usually gets lumped with the nines or elevens, but today he has made himself invisible in a desk by the window, alternating between curved tails on ‘q’s and staring out the window. Every harvest has grown dustier as he has grown taller, dust storms more likely than thunder. His ghost doesn’t seem to discriminate between the types.

Speak of the Devil and he will appear.

Hajime jumps out of his seat, wood chair clattering to the floor. His old friend’s face has just popped in the window, still six and wild, teeth bared in an inhuman grin. _Boo_ , he mouths through the warped glass.

“Hajime?” He spins to see the class staring at him, the teacher with a worried tilt to her head. “Is something wrong?”

Hajime swallows on a dry throat. “Shelter.” He rubs his eyes and looks out the window - he’s gone again, the blue sky square brilliant. “We need to get to a shelter, a storm's coming.”

She hums and comes to the window, peering out at the cloudless sky. “I don’t see anything.”

“We should listen to him,” his fourteen-year-old sister says from across the room, standing up. “He’s never been wrong before.”

The teacher’s eyebrows furrow behind her glasses, but the two other Iwaizumis in the schoolhouse nod, along with a few of their closer neighbors who have taken shelter with their family before. She purses her lips, but she knows better than to argue with farm kids about the weather. She sighs.

“Okay, let’s go to the cellar,” she says, “but if you’re lying you’re _all_ getting lines.” The schoolroom creaks as everyone rushes out to the cellar door dug by the side of the building, calling out to people in the neighboring fields to take cover. Hajime melts into them, but he doesn’t miss the pucker on his teacher’s face, the careful distance kept by his classmates.

(Twenty minutes later, when the dust storm bangs at the cellar door like the big bad wolf, his teacher clutches him tight and whispers, repeats, _thank you, thank you, thank you._ )

* * *

Hajime first confronts his personal demon when he is fourteen years and one month old. Three of his siblings and his father have left the farm to find work, sending back crumpled ones in the mail every month or so. The crops aren’t worth the land they wither on; every harvest, his mother sells another half-acre to the hungry bankers, shark teeth promising that she’s getting a good deal her broken English doesn’t comprehend. Hajime and his two sisters work the bites left, stretching every fifteen cents to a dollar, but the only ones succeeding in this caked-up kitchen sink of a state are the bankers and the pawn shops.

Hajime is walking home from the store and the post office in town, paper bag propped on his hip as he reads Daichi’s letter (the money already spent on the groceries). He’s found a job with some rich oil family down in San Antonio as gardener and handyman. He’s learning to drive a car now, although he says that’s not so much for his job and more because the family’s own oldest son wants to teach him. Hajime smiles, imagining his brother behind the wheel of some shiny Packard worth more than the farm, terrified, a posh rich kid in a sweatervest yelling at him about gearshifts. He’s not bitter; he’s just glad there is a chance of happiness in this depression.

The letter almost blows out of his loose grip. He tightens his hold and whips around - his old friend is floating over the dead corn across the road, upside-down in the middle of a maniacal flip. Hajime growls and shoves the letter in his grocery bag, stomping across the packed dirt and into the field. “ _Hey!_ ”

His old friend stops spinning, looking through his legs at Hajime. “Oh! It’s you!”

“Yeah, it’s me! Why won’t you leave me the hell alone!” he screams over the crescendoing gusts. His old friend flips, flips, floats like he’s lying on his stomach, tan feet in the air, chin in his hands and ankles crossed. “You’re not even really him, are you?”

His old friend blinks, innocent owl eyes in a child’s face. “Oh, this human? Of course I’m not.” He swoops in faster than should be possible, face halting a foot from Hajime’s. “I just put this on for you. Don’t you like it?”

Hajime holds his ground, working his bare feet into the loose dry soil. “You don’t scare me.”

Not-his old friend guffaws, propelling back in the air with its force, clutching his stomach. “Oh, Hajime, I love it when you lie! It’s so cute!”

Hajime swallows, skin crawling. He doesn’t want to know why this thing knows his name. “You’re sick, looking like a little kid when you’re just a monster.”

 _It_ holds a finger to its mouth, eyebrows raised too high. “That’s not a bad point, my little human.” It scrunches up its face - for a breath, it’s a puff of smoke in the shape of a boy, then the smoke swirls to reform a longer, lankier version of his old friend, arms and legs splayed like it just jumped out of a cake. “There! Is that better?” it asks, face still childlike in a body the same age as Hajime. His stomach revolts.

“You’re sick. Go die.”

But it tuts, clucking his old friend’s aged-up tongue at him. “Now, now. You think I would be here if I could die just like that?” It crosses its arms and shakes its head. “Try again, Iwa-chan.”

Hajime jerks. “Don’t call me that.”

It cocks its head. “Why not? He called you that. Don’t you miss it? Humans are supposed to miss things that die.”

Hajime balls his free fist at his side. “ _Stop_.”

It breathes on, “Of course, you’ve always been an odd one.” It grins at him, all teeth showing. “That’s why I _like_ you.”

Hajime grits his teeth. “I’m leaving.” He turns on his toes back to the road. It flies in front of his face before two steps, gasping.

“No! Why would you go back to boring old _them_ when you could have _me?_ ” It comes down to Hajime’s eye level, but its feet refuse to touch the ground, the wind keeping it aloft. “We’ve _bonded_ , you and I. It’s so _hard_ to talk to humans, but they’re better company than birds when they learn to listen.” Its breath smells like fresh lightning - burnt rainclouds. “And you’ve _finally_ figured out how to do that.”

Hajime’s tired of yelling in a field. He steps around it, but it follows overhead, pout visceral. “Aw, don’t you want to ask me stuff? What I am? Where I come from? What’s my name?”

“Not particularly, if you’ll just leave me alone.”

“I thought you were _fun_ , Iwa-chan.” It sighs, limbs drooping like there’s a hook around its waist. “I guess I’ll tell you next time.” Hajime frowns up, but it has already gone, a puff of fog filtering up to join the wallcloud overhead.

Hajime runs the whole way home.

* * *

Hajime first learns its name when he is fourteen years and three months old. He’s safe, at home, sitting on the back porch with a tin cup of coffee, watching the sunset. His mother and two remaining sisters are making dinner inside, having rejected his attempts to help with laughter and good nature, banishing him until it’s ready. The windows are boarded up against the constant peril of a duststorm; all they need to do is bar the doors and huddle behind the furniture.

When it pops into appearance beside him, all he does is take another sip of coffee. It pouts.

“Stop being such a rainy day, Hajime,” it whines, “that’s _my_ job.”

“Oh?” Another sip. “Are you some kind of rain god, then?”

It heaves a heavy sigh and lays back, feet coming up to prop on nothing. “ _God_ is such a heavy word.” It bounces a foot in the air. “I prefer _deity_.”

Hajime snorts. “You’re a vain little shit.”

“Well of course I am.” It shakes its hair back, eyes closed. “You little people have been running from me for thousands of years. It’s plenty to be vain about.” It lies on its side, propping itself up with a hand in thin air. “You’re the first one in a few strains that’s screamed at me, though. Your friend reached out to me, so that’s why I use their form, but the screamers are my favorite.”

Hajime frowns into his coffee dregs. “So are you responsible for the droughts, then?”

“Oh, thunder, no, that’s much bigger than me.” It arches back, chaotic fingers brushing the Iwaizumi porch. “I’m just playing my part, like anybody else.”

Hajime’s coarse hair stings where it whaps against his cheek. “Is any… attention you pay here because of me?”

It laughs, nose wrinkling like his old friend’s used to, and pats his head, wind fingers twisting through the strands. “It’s always so cute how you humans think any one of you is important.”

Hajime swallows on a dry tongue. “But aren’t I your favorite of the moment?”

“Mmm, maybe, but just of the moment.” A strong gust forces his chin up to look in its eyes - they’re the same cinnamon of his old friend, but the black pupils swirl deeper than any human’s ever could. “Would you like to know my favorite name of the moment, too?”

Hajime scowls. “Can’t I just call you ‘little shit’?”

It guffaws. “That’s the Hajime I remember!” But it plows on. “I’ve had lots of names, you know. ‘Little shit’ wouldn’t even be the most insulting.” It rolls around, tumbleweeding in the air. “But the one I like most is Okawatoru.” Hajime’s lip curls, but it’s lost in its own world, falling over itself like a drifting snowflake. “It’s from the only language I killed off entirely on my own.” It clutches its laced fingers to its chest. “I’ll never forget them.”

“Don’t you have some unsuspecting farm to destroy?” Hajime growls. Its eyes snap open.

“Oh, do I!” It falls on Hajime’s lap, a tiny whirlwind in his arms, and flicks his cheek with a sharp cold burst. “I’ll see you again, Hajime Iwa-chan.” It puffs away, dissipating instantly as the wind carries it away.

“Who are you talking to, Hajime-chan?” his mother calls from inside.

“No one.” He dumps his coffee grounds off the porch. “Just the wind.”

* * *

Hajime first knows adult fear when he is fifteen years and ten months old.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Iwaizumi, but this just doesn’t cover the price of your payment,” the shark-toothed banker across the dark wood desk slithers out, navy suit pressed and brushed free of any clinging dust specks. It must be afraid to touch him. Hajime’s mother wrings her handkerchief, old blood spotted in faded brown across it. Hajime grips the back of her flimsy chair, glaring holes into the banker’s silk tie.

“Prease, sir, it arr we have, I promise we get the rest-”

“Next time, yes, Mrs. Iwaizumi, but you said that last month, did you not?” He smiles again. Hajime holds his mother’s shoulder. “I _guess_ we can defer your leftover amount to next month, but if this continues much longer, we’ll have to seize the farm.” He licks the tip of his pen. “What’s left, at least.”

His mother bows her head - his hands shake. “I- I understand. Thank you.” The banker signs the papers in front of him, slides them across for her to write her shaky Latin letters horizontally across. He’s already onto his next victim as Hajime helps her to her feet despite her protests that she can stand alone. He takes her arm and leads her through the bank’s front lobby to the large double doors, both of them trembling. She coughs, wet with new blood. He clutches her wrist tighter.

* * *

Hajime first asks for the impossible when he is sixteen years and one month old. He’s the only son left, only child, his two leftover sisters trickled away - one married to a traveling salesman, the other gone to Little Rock and the maid’s position a friend promised to her. Only Hajime’s father and his oldest brother still write or send money. The farm is little more than a ramshackle home with a garden plot out back. Hajime is being strangled to death at his mother’s bedside.

One afternoon, she lays a clammy hand on his wrist as he doles out her medicine. “Hajime-chan,” she whispers in Japanese. “I want you to sell the farm.”

He frowns at her. “Okaa-san, I can’t do that. You’re too sick to leave.”

She shakes her head, sweaty hair clinging to her worn pale face. “Dear, I’m dying. We both know that.” She cups his cheek; he holds her hand there, callouses over wrinkles. She’s barely forty. “I always hoped to go home before I died, with you, or your father.” She sighs. “But he wouldn’t leave his beloved new country, and, well, it was never the right time.” Her hand slips away, eyes glazed over. “Promise me you’ll take me there someday?”

He swallows on a constricted throat. “I promise, Okaa-san. We’ll go together.”

She sighs again, a long exhale of spirit. “You always were my good boy, Hajime-chan.” The shutters bang against the empty windowframe as he clutches her fingers, her grip losing strength with every shallow breath until it relaxes with a final sigh, her head lolling. He shudders in a breath - the scent thick. He shoves to his feet, clothes struggling in the fingers of wind from the paneless window. He runs, across the splintered floor, through the filthy kitchen, jumping the porch steps into the oncoming storm.

“ _Okawatoru!_ ” he screams for the first time.

It appears before him, splitting grin wide and inches away. “You’ve never called me before, Iwa-chan,” it says, hanging almost vertical in the air. “I’m _flattered_.”

Hajime doesn’t have time for this. “You’re a god, right?” It tilts its head, child eyes blinking. Hajime points back at the house - his face stings in the sharp air. “ _Fix her_.”

“Hmm?” The shutters flap upstairs. “Oh, there’s nothing I can do about that.” It shrugs. “Tear down a building, sure, flood a field, any day, but life? That’s not my job.” It swims in circles around Hajime, body following head in an arc. “The cycle of the world is unidirectional for a reason, Hajime. It spins, it spins, and it cannot stop without throwing everything off.” Hajime falls to his knees in the barren soil. “There’s nothing anyone can do to halt a storm once it’s built.”

Hajime swallows, staring at the frays around the patches his mother sewed onto his knees. “Then what good are you,” he breathes.

“Good?” It laughs. “Oh, you’re being such a _little_ human right now, Iwa-chan.” It twists to sit a foot in the air before Hajime, cross-legged, hands braced on its knees. “This ‘good’ thing, ‘bad’, ‘evil’, ‘time’, they’re all silly mortal concepts that humans made up. They don’t exist.” It sighs and lays back, keeps tilting under to plant its hands on the ground, dust devilling under its nails. “I’m no more good then you are evil. There is just existing, and nonexisting.” It grips Hajime’s chin with fingers that sting, makes him look into eyes that burn. “Grow up, Iwa-chan.” _Poof_.

Hajime cries out, bangs his fists into the dirt, tears dropping to water it. The thirsty ground drinks it up, soon to be overwhelmed with Okawatoru’s storm.

He goes back inside.

* * *

Hajime first leaves all he knows behind when he is sixteen years and two months old. The bankers seize the farm with red joy, lips parted over silk as he signs his name - twice, horizontal and vertical, just to piss them off. He puts together a knapsack - crackers, a canteen, extra shirt and socks, a pencil, his brother’s latest letter inviting him to San Antonio, an old cookie tin that held his mother’s sewing supplies, now welded shut around her ashes. He refused to bury her.

He wastes good coin on postage, delivering the news to the last known locations of his family, scattered to the four winds. He doesn’t wait for a reply; he helps their neighbors bring in the last whispers of the meager harvest, just enough wage to get him the hundred miles southeast. He leaves town one dry morning, not looking back.

A loose finger of wind curls up under his collar, nestling in a scarfed flutter around his throat, accompanying him away.


End file.
